92: Reconnecting with Our Creativity

“We have to be much more allowing of ourselves, allowing ourselves to try things out and make mistakes and that’s so crucial – Can we allow ourselves to make mistakes? And maybe use the mistakes to take us on a different journey?”

Emma Cameron could reasonably be describing talk therapy or the practice of our creative energy but she is actually talking about both. How do we recover our creativity? How does the disconnection happen in the first place? How can we benefit from the practice of creativity in therapy and our lives? Join us this week as Emma discusses the role of creativity and creation in our journey toward self discovery.
Emma Cameron is a registered Integrative Arts Psychotherapist based in Essex, England. She works in private practice and online with women who want to connect to their deepest creative self and heal from anxiety and trauma. Emma has a Masters degree in Integrative Art Psychotherapy and she is a HCPC registered Art Psychotherapist. Emma paints, draws and has been practicing art for many years. Through 2017 Emma’s work was featured in ‘Contemporary Masters from Britain’, an exhibition touring major art galleries in China; next year she will be exhibiting paintings in Poland and the UK.

Time Stamps:
3:10 – How did Emma find creativity and outlet and start practicing?
7:00 – What is creativity and what does it mean to be creative?
12 – Excuses, excuses: How we trick ourselves into believing we can’t create
16 – Using our creative “mistakes” to create something new
19 – Letting go of judgments and allowing ourselves to play
20:30 – The benefits of creativity in therapy
23 – What does creative therapy look like in practice?
28:20 – Emma provides a guided visualization for accessing creativity

Quotes:
5:18 “I think you’re tapping into different parts of your brain and different parts of yourself quite deeply when you’re using art materials and the talking is important as well and we don’t leave that out but we really try and have something that feels experiential…I feel like in therapy, connecting to your feelings and connecting to some sort of deep sense of “This is me” can be so healing and profound and I think that arts are a really good way of doing that.”

7:10 “All of us have an inner urge to grow and in psychotherapy we call it different things…but this inner urge to grow and to just sort of be in a way that’s just living and growing and changing…We all have this in us. Sometimes we tap into it and sometimes we don’t. And I really feel that the more that we tap into it, the more it can be used by us to feed our whole self, our whole life. I think it’s just a very basic part of being human and a lot of us don’t realize this but I think people kind of know it on a deep level somewhere…I think it’s just a basic thing in people.”

10 “People have art wounds or art scars…I’ve noticed that people who say ‘Oh, I’m not creative. I can’t paint, I can’t draw, I can’t whatever.’ If you ask them ‘What happened to you? Have you got a memory of being told this? How did you learn you weren’t creative?’ And people will very often have a memory of a time when either a relative, or a friend, or a teacher, very often a teacher, shamed them or made them feel that their attempts to be creative were not okay, not enough in some way…Those experiences can cut very deep. It’s really quite remarkable.”

12:15 “People really tell themselves stories about why they aren’t or can’t be creative and that’s natural because the way our brains are built is to make stories or meanings but it’s quite interesting if we sort of stop and look at the stories we tell ourselves about why we can’t be creative and very often we’ll say ‘Oh, well, I haven’t got enough money, I can’t afford to buy the art materials or whatever it is’ or the other big one is ‘I haven’t got enough time, I just don’t have time’ and both of those actually can be challenged. It’s quite interesting, because very often beneath there, there’s this more hidden sort of shame feeling that are harder for people to talk about and so we look at the money and the time thing, both of which can be thought about it different ways…People can find ways of being creative without having access to money, it really is possible. And as far as time goes, yes you might not have five hours a day to carve your stone carving but you might have fifteen minutes!”

14:20 “There is no right way to be creative…We have to be much more allowing of ourselves, allowing ourselves to try things out and make mistakes and that’s so crucial – Can we allow ourselves to make mistakes? And maybe use the mistakes to take us on a different journey?”

19:20 “It really is about letting go of judgements and goals and all of that way of thinking and just allowing yourself to sink down into something, some more inner kind of knowing and some more experimental, curious, playful way of being.”